


Knights kill dragons

by Icie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other, Science fantasy setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 12:06:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18800008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icie/pseuds/Icie
Summary: Jingyi met her first dragon when she was seven years old. Their teeth were bared and they were ready to kill. Not her, but someone scrambling backwards on their hands, trying to escape the dragon's path.Faced with her very first dragon, she screamed at them to stop. And they had.





	Knights kill dragons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ethereally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethereally/gifts).



Jingyi met her first dragon when she was seven years old. Their teeth were bared and they were ready to kill. Not her, but someone scrambling backwards on their hands, trying to escape the dragon's path. 

Faced with her very first dragon, she screamed at them to stop. And they had.

They stopped with their claw at the woman's throat to round on her. Their tail lashed behind them like a silver whip. Their eyes were slits. Madness radiated from their scales.

She didn't remember what happened after that. But the burns explained it well enough.

*

The students whispered around Jingyi. All of them were the same age as her, but taller, more robust. She fiddled with the cuff of her glove and twisted her finger around to where the button sat too tightly against her skin.

A boy at least twice her height, clapped her on the shoulder, making her jump.

"I heard this one's seen one already," he said. He probably thought his smile was encouraging or reassuring, but Jingyi wished he wouldn't touch her. She wished she couldn't see his white teeth.

All eyes in the room fell on her at his words.

She smiled, but without teeth, though even that  
much was enough to stretch the burn on the corner of her mouth which wraps down over her chin tight. She could hardly deny it, didn't have to confirm it either. She would let them think what they liked.

The boy left his hand on her shoulder and waited for a reply. The other students stared. None of them would see a dragon for a year, perhaps longer if they failed their tests.

She continued to smile.

The silence grew awkward.

Their new professor entered the room, breaking the stillness. 

The boy finally withdrew his hand, casting her a confused look as he took a seat in the front.

It doesn't matter, she thought to herself, none of this matters, really. She had been seven when she met the dragon. Now, she barely remembered what it had looked like in person, only that the few photographs printed of dragons were nothing like the creatures themselves.

The professor sighed. They had scattered a pile of notes across their desk, and were rifling through them, looking for a particular sheet.

The other students took seats — all of them in the first two rows. The room felt larger for the unoccupied spaces behind them.

"Not many of you this year," their teacher commented as they found the sheet they were looking for and set it on top of the drift of other papers. "So, why did you sign up to die?"

Despite a hiss from one of the students behind Jingyi, they began to give their answers.

Jingyi stared resolutely ahead as she answered. "There's a dragon I need to kill."

*

They spent the next year in a hard routine. Physical and mental training for sixteen hours a day and then sync dreams for the other eight, to tune their minds to the dragons' world.

After a week of training, Jingyi wasn't sure whether she was awake or asleep most days. She lived with residual nausea from having split her mind across two planes. 

The sync sickness took its toll on all of them differently. Only the tall boy who had identified her on the first day, Tom, never seemed to be affected. But then a month in she had caught him dashing into a toilet one morning, and followed to hold his hair back and rub his shoulder as he retched into the bowl through his sobs. Ten minutes later the only trace of his time spent ejecting the skerricks of the previous night's meal was a puffiness around his eyes barely perceptible on his dark skin.

From then, he seemed to decide they were friends, though Jingyi wasn't as sure.

He'd invited her to sit with his other friends at meals, and then they were her friends as well.

The sickness became more bearable after that. Jingyi told herself it was because she had built up resistance, but she was lying.

*

"Jingyi," their professor said, quietly, at the end of one of their evening lessons. The professor's subject was history and ethics. She had overheard them making a joke to another student that the two are rarely known to mix. She had smiled, but whoever they were talking to had just stammered _"Professor?"_ and the professor had let them be.

She didn't ask what they wanted her for, she had expected someone to ask sooner or later. She paused, and ducked her head, waiting for them to speak.

They sighed first. She didn't take it personally, they had as much interest as she did in conversation, even necessary ones. "Your scars are from dragonfire," they said.

She nodded.

"You want to kill that dragon," they said. It wasn't a question. She hadn't expected it to be one. They sighed again. "You are going to find that difficult."

She nodded, eyes still fixed on the tiled floor.

"It will hurt," they said.

She flinched. And nodded.

They sighed once again, and gestured for her to sit. "The dragon will find you, they always do if they've marked you, or so the stories say."

A nod. It was all she could make herself do.

"We don't know what it's like over there," they pointed out.

"No one comes back," she said.

They didn't seem to mind that she didn't look them in the eye when she spoke.

"No one comes back," the professor confirmed.

"I don't need to come back," she said. She wondered whether anyone else has said this to them. She wondered whether how many people they've sent off to die weighs on them. She wondered whether she could do that.

*

A month before their mission, Jingyi lost her mind. 

It was normal, of course, intentional, just what had to happen. But not so early, no so suddenly. Not _then_.

One moment she had been fine, but the next she was in the dragons' plane, and something held her there, while her body moved on its own.

She could still feel her body, or thought she could. But she couldn't move it. She couldn't make it work.

No one noticed at first, but then her body had stood up, and the bench she and three others were sitting on tipped over as if her legs were made of iron and her mouth had smiled, full of teeth.

Her body lunged forward, across the table, at Tom's throat. Her fingers are blunt and stubby, but Jingyi has no doubt that with a dragon moving them, they can do whatever the dragon wants.

She yelled at her body to stop.

And for the second time, a dragon turned to face her.

She didn't see it, or anything, until she woke up from her death.

*

Tom laughed, releasing her from a hug. "We had no fucking idea what happened, you just _collapsed_ , you know?"

She knew. He'd told her three times now.

"You were like _rarghh!_ And I was like _aaah!_ And then there you were on the floor! That's not supposed to happen, you know?"

She nodded. She knew that too.

She'd explained to him when the others passed through that the professors were right, and a dragon had jacked her. What the professors hadn't been able to guess was what happened to make the dragon _stop_. 

She had told him. His eyes had gone wide, and the others lingering behind, pretending not to listen, had frozen.

The dragon had listened to her. Again.

"It _jacked_ you," Tom continued to marvel.

"I'm aware," she said.

"And then it fucked off?"

A premonition of a horrible thing crossed her mind, and she almost managed to get her hands across his mouth, but she should have known better than to think she could shut Tom up.

"So that means it jacked you off!" he said.

He was so proud of himself.

She wished her death was a quiet one.

*

They did recon. They drew maps. They pitched tents. They made things. They put their training into practice and lived their second lives.

And then Jingyi found the castle. 

She was alone, as she likes to be, but had with her plenty of supplies in case she was cut off from the others. 

The castle was huge, and she felt like it was swallowing her as she entered through the large, crumbled door. 

* 

She must have wandered through it's halls for hours but the time didn't affect her, though the dust made her breath hitch and she forced herself to sit and eat when she should have been hungry. 

She brushed the dirt from her clothes and carried on. 

*

"Babe!" 

Jingyi swung around. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It laughed.

"Fucking shit, it is you, isn't it? I can't believe it. Sweetheart!"

Out of the darkness, Jingyi saw a flash of white and silver and then arms wrapped around her. The owner of the voice inhaled with their nose in her hair before holding her by her shoulders at arm's length.

They were grinning, and Jingyi remembered that smile, even though it had been on a different face. But it didn't last. Their smile faltered, and slipped entirely.

She reached for her knife. Her hand shook. She could no more put her hand on her knife than when the dragon — _this_ dragon — jacked her body.

She had seen them twice before and it felt like she knew they. And she _knew_ they knew her.

Though they didn't know her body.

"I hurt you," they said as they studied her skin.

"It's fine," Jingyi replied, though she wasn't sure that it was. "It happened a long time ago."

They frowned, and with a single finger, traced the burn on her cheek to her mouth and down to the collar of her uniform, where they pulled the fastenings open.

Jingyi let them. Her heart thumped as they touched her, as their fingers ran over the divide between her smooth, healthy skin, and the scar tissue, where she could only feel it in patches.

They didn't linger on her breasts, but made their way down into her trousers, stepping around and following the edge under her ass. They gasped when they caught sight of her back. The scars spread across it were the worst of them. They followed it with a little mewl of distress, and curled around her again.

"I didn't mean to," they said against the small splash of a scar on the back of her neck, the one that creeps into her hairline.

"I know," she said, and reached a shaking hand behind her, to awkwardly pat at the dragon's side. "Can you let me go?"

"Not a chance."

*

She had, eventually, convinced them to at least switch to holding her hand, and be towed towards her camp. She picked up her pack where she'd set it down in the archway, but when she went to sling it on her back, the dragon intercepted it, unlacing the top and sticking their nose in, all while keeping their fingers entwined with hers.

They turned over the pieces inside, one by one, though from their expression they didn't know what most of it was, so Jingyi took up explaining.

"Underwear," she said. They sniffed it, and sneezed. "Used," she clarified.

"What's the point of it?"

Jingyi couldn't believe this day. "Humans… smell. And over time that gets on our clothes, so we change them and wash the old ones."

The dragon's tongue darted out. 

Jingyi yelped. "Don't do that!"

They paused, tongue out, curious. "Thy not?"

"It's gross!" 

They withdrew their tongue. Frowned. "Okay." And continued rifling through the bag.

She explained ration packs, oral care, thermal blankets, menstrual products ("Super gross!" "Not really, just what happens.") and her weapons, treated without due deference.

"They were supposed to kill you," Jingyi commented. 

The dragon laughed. "These?" they said, and ran the blade across their wrist. It didn't leave a scratch. "That's adorable. _You're_ adorable, babe."

Jingyi's expression settled into a glare. "I'm not a child," she said.

The dragon tilted their head, curious. "But you're not even a hundred, you're..." They mouthed words until they find the end of their sentence. "Twenty three human years? You're tiny!"

"I'm fully grown."

"Miniature," the dragon chirped.

"You're obnoxious," she said. "Dragons are supposed to be regal."

"But I'm me instead!" The dragon grinned. "And you like me."

"I do no such thing," Jingyi said. But she knew she was lying.

The dragon snorted, making a sound that a human nose and mouth couldn't possibly form.

Jingyi sighed. The stories did say that a dragon finds who it marks.

"What's your name?" she asked, knowing that doing so was an admission that the dragon was going to stay.

The dragon tilted their head.

"Jingyi," they said. "Isn't it a nice name? I chose it myself."

Jingyi's breath hitched as she tried not to laugh. "Of course you did."

She couldn't imagine any other way the dragon would pick a name.

**Author's Note:**

> "You've jacked off Jingyi," Jingyi said to herself. 
> 
> Tom was going to lose his mind.


End file.
